


What the Vampire Diaries can tell us about Roj Blake (meta)

by aralias



Category: Blake's 7, The Vampire Diaries - L. J. Smith
Genre: Gen, Meta, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 21:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13726509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias
Summary: Fanlore told me that the 'Vampire Diaries' books featured Blake- and Avon-avatars. Four books later, I wrote this.





	What the Vampire Diaries can tell us about Roj Blake (meta)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for apazine [The Way Forward](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Way_Forward) #89, February 2018. 'The Way Forward' is all about Roj Blake, which is why this article focuses on him.

For those who don’t know: the _Vampire Diaries_ is a series of books and television programmes about Elena, a young American girl who keeps a diary and falls in love with a vampire and/or his vampire brother. The original quartet of books was published in 1991 and 1992; the TV show began in 2009 and finished last year (2017). I haven’t watched the television series, so won’t be talking much about it.

From this description you might think, ‘There doesn’t seem to be much the _Vampire Diaries_ can tell us _at all_ about Blake!’ and you’d be absolutely right – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In the last issue of _The Way Forward_ I talked about Fanlore. Among many other fascinating and insightful entries, Fanlore has a page entitled ‘Blake’s 7 Avatars in Pro Books’, which is (in part) a copy of material from Hermit. The _Vampire Diaries_ is on the Avatars list. This surprised me – not because I had any preconceived notions about the _Vampire Diaries._ I’d neither read it, nor seen the show, at the point I discovered its supposed Blake-connections, but I knew the _Vampire Diaries_ was very famous. People I know who don’t like 1980s sci-fi have watched the series. The other books on the B7 avatar list aren’t nearly so big, with perhaps the exception of Tanith Lee’s _Kill the Dead._ Lee, as we know, actively wrote for B7, though, so it’s less of a surprise that she might re-use Avon and Vila than that a reasonably popular teen series would clone Blake without people talking about it more.

I’ve already read _Kill the Dead_ (and wrote [a Fanlore page](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Kill_the_Dead) on it) _,_ so I already knew it didn’t feature Blake at all. The quotes on [Fanlore about _Vampire Diaries_](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Blake%27s_7_Avatars_in_Pro_Books) _,_ though, were a lot more promising.

 _“I also read the L.J. Smith "Vampire Diaries" that Rebecca mentioned. For the first three books I couldn't decide whether the Blake-Avon resemblance of the vampire brothers was coincidental or not. Then I read the fourth book, which lifts such obvious B7 lines as "That makes it all worthwhile" and "Make me die, it's the only thing you can make me do" and "I don't need you... Anyone who follows me, I'll kill." Definitely too much for coincidence there!”_ [ _Rallying Call_ , a Blake-centric B7 APA]

and

 _“I knew L.J. Smith (Vampire Diaries author) for awhile and can assure you that she was most definitely a Blakes, and Blake 7, fan. She also wrote some of the best B/A [Blake/Avon] stories I've read, under a pseud, of course. And no, I can't tell you what it is, since I'd promised to keep it to myself.”_ [ _Rallying Call_ again, a reply to the above]

Retrospectively I can see where I went wrong. There is no firm confirmation that Blake _would actually_ be in the _Vampire Diaries_ in either of those quotes, but even now I understand why I found it difficult to resist buying the first four books to investigate further. If the series _had_ been about a turbulent Blake and Avon relationship, in which both of them were vampires, I might well have loved it.

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman’s essay ‘Myriad mirrors: doppelgangers and doubling in _The Vampire Diaries_ ’ [ _Open Graves, Open Minds_ ] gives some indication of the kind of thing I would have been looking for if Blake and Avon had been present. McMahon-Coleman writes:

 _“In these early episodes, Damon is constructed as the binary opposite of ‘new vampire’ Stefan. Yet these initial depictures are simplistic and, as the series progresses, viewers are shown more nuanced representations of the character which strongly imply that the brothers are capable of behaving like the other. … The complete reversal of their roles, demonstrated through the televisual technique of the flashback, shows that they are each ‘truly half of one whole and a divided self that is capable of oscillation between two extremes’_ [‘Myriad mirrors’  quoting Ann Thurber’s _Bite Me_ ].”

This idea resonates with me as a _Blake’s 7_ fan. I’d argue the same trajectory could be applied to the relationship between Blake and Avon. Initially Blake is the hero and Avon his anti-hero (you could say Travis is the foil to Blake, but Travis is so bad at his job that Blake doesn’t take him seriously, and neither should we.) This binary opposition is obviously troubled while Blake is still on the _Liberator_ , with Blake becoming more and more morally grey and Avon more heroic, but the true switch takes place once Blake leaves. At this point Avon takes Blake’s role, both as the protagonist of the show and as the leader of the Liberator crew. Whatever Avon might want to be the case, he actively rebels, as Blake did, and fights the Federation because “winning is the only safety.” Meanwhile Blake has become a kind of Avon, who has been betrayed so many times that he no longer trusts anyone. Although it’s an act, the role of the bounty hunter casts Blake as someone focused on money (he can only kill people with a price on their head) and he is sarcastic and almost unhelpful towards Deva, who initially appears to be his superior officer. It could definitely be argued that Blake and Avon are each “truly half of one whole and a divided self that is capable of oscillation between two extremes”. I thought it might have been interesting to watch that dynamic play out in _Vampire Diaries,_ even if I don’t think the dynamic is a brotherly one.

However.

Having read all four books of the first _Vampire Diaries_ quartet, (the later books are either not written by Smith, or were written so much later that fandom doesn’t recognise them), I’m pretty sure that Blake _isn’t_ in them. It is true that there are _Blake’s 7_ quotes in book 4, ‘The Dark Reunion’ (I’ll list some of those quotes later), but Blake himself is not present in any form I recognise.

This presented me with a problem. As well as simple morbid interest and the dubious possibility that the series would be my new favourite thing, the reason I decided to read the _Vampire Diaries_ was that I knew I needed to write a trib for this issue of _The Way Forward._ I’ve already said a lot of what I want to say about Blake (in my fic and on my blog), so I wanted something new.

What I’d decided was that I’d write a piece about Blake avatars (or clones, as it were) and what they could tell us about how the various writers viewed Blake as a character. As well as the _Vampire Diaries,_ the books on the avatar list (most of which _aren’t_ about Blake, you’ll note) and some novels by former fic writers Nova and Julia Jones, I knew there was a series of books by Joel Cornah that _was_ definitely about Blake … at least to some extent. I’d started reading Cornah’s first book a while ago, but given up on it – however, it was still on my Kindle!

In an interview with the Sci Fi Fantasy Network, Cornah says of his novels:

_“I already had a heroic character in my fantasy world – Rob Sardan – and he had just failed in a big way in one of my previous novels – The Sea-Stone Sword. He desperately needed an Avon. Someone to tell him he was full of it, that he was dangerous, and that heroes need to keep their feet on the ground, even if their heads are in the clouds. This needed to be someone who Rob could respect, too, otherwise why would he listen to them? … I had a character I’d been developing for another project in the same universe but I suddenly felt like she would fit this role.”_

[ilsa-fireswan](http://ilsa-fireswan.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr picked out several quotations from the _Sky Slayer_ that are definite nods to _Blake’s 7_.

_“Am I required to become irrational to prove that I care? Why should I have to prove it at all?”_

and

_“I want to be free.”_  
_“You are free, now!”_  
_“Am I free from you? No, not while you masquerade as a captain and drag the others with you. You can fight as many pirates as you like, you can wade through blood up to your ankles, you can destroy a thousand tyrants across the seas, but there will be no end to it! I’ve tried fighting tyrants, but it never ends, a new one always crops up, or else you become one.”_

ilsa-fireswan also analyses Cornah’s first book in relation to B7 in her [post](http://ilsa-fireswan.tumblr.com/post/167049990249/shades-of-blakes-7). She says that there isn’t really 1-1 relationship between the characters, so they aren’t _Blake’s 7_ avatars as such, unlike _Kill the Dead_ ’s Parl Dro, who is an Avon who kills ghosts. ilsa-fireswan describes Rob Sardan in book 1 as a boy looking to be a hero and says, “There is absolutely a portion of Blakes 7 fandom who believes that a factor - maybe even the deciding factor - in Blake’s decision to blow up Star One was his personal need to be right and “make everything we’ve done worthwhile.” My assumption is she doesn’t necessarily think this of Blake _herself_ , or think that Sardan is a representation of Blake exactly. Reading the Conrah interview again, I think it’s a fair assumption that he wrote Rob Sardan without thinking of Blake particularly, and then wrote an Avon to counter his hero. Alya consciously has elements of Avon in her character, but Sardan existed separately, at least initially.

If I had decided to write a proper Blake avatars piece I would have finished reading Cornah’s books myself. If I had, and I was talking about them in depth, I would have said that, if we talk of female Avon avatars in Science Fiction, we should talk about Aeryn Sun. _Farscape,_ as I assume you know, is almost certainly influenced by _Blake’s 7_ and Aeryn by Avon. John Cricthon is not Blake.

I’m now going to be very gauche and quote my own girlfriend, Erin Horakova, who wrote an essay called ‘[Boucher, Backbone and Blake – the Legacy of Blake’s 7](http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/boucher-backbone-and-blake-the-legacy-of-blakes-7/)’ for online magazine _Strange Horizons_. (It’s good. If you haven’t read it, you should.) In this essay Erin writes:

__

“Shows that borrow from Blakes 7 tend to want the program’s strong ensemble cast, its criminals-on-the-frontier concept, some of its design chutzpah, its snark, its political preoccupations, and/or its "grim" reputation. … Curiously, people almost universally fail to steal what makes Blakes 7 vital, special and (still) relevant. There are things I wish people would gank. These can be summed up as Writing, Backbone and **Blake**.”

She’s right, and this, really, is the point and what one of the main things I learned (again) from reading the _Vampire Diaries._ Even L.J. Smith, someone who apparently used to write Blake/Avon fanfiction, chose not to take Blake, or not in a form that I recognised. The vampire brothers, I eventually concluded, are not Blake and Avon. They are both Avon.

Stefan, the good brother, is described in the first book as wearing jeans “he probably had to peel off at night” and a “leather jacket of an unusual cut”. His hair is “wavy – and dark” and his features are “so fine they could have been taken from a Roman coin or medallion. High cheekbones, classic straight nose … and a mouth to keep you awake at night, Elena thought. The upper lip was beautifully sculpted, a little sensitive, the whole lot sensual.”

Stefan is strongly motivated by guilt, which sounds a bit like Blake perhaps, but the reason Stefan is guilty is that long ago he betrayed Katherine: the woman he loved, who died (we wrongly believe) because he made the wrong choice. At the beginning of the novel, he has decided to hold himself aloof from Elena, so as not to hurt her either. He also holds himself back from drinking human blood, even though it would make him stronger and allow him the power he needs to defeat the twin threats – first of Katherine (not dead, actually now evil) and then of Klaus, the man who made her a vampire.

Apart from the guilt, nothing about Stefan says Blake to me. There is a school of fanfiction that believes Blake is a pure (if bumbling) hero type, but Stefan isn’t even particularly heroic in that sense. He has no particular great goal or vision he is striving for. He’s focused on his own enduring pain and his love for particular individuals, which (when returned) can relieve that pain. He is the romantic side of Avon.

This, I concluded (wrongly and before meeting him), must mean that Blake was the bad-boy brother, Damon.

One of the few things that I knew about the _Vampire Diaries_ before reading it was that there was “a famous (or infamous) broyay pseudo-rape scene between Stefan and Damon Salvatore in The Awakening” [Fanlore]. If you are lucky enough not to have read any 1990s grimdark Blake/Avon or Avon/Vila fic, let me tell you – this is the kind of thing that people used to write. For a hero, Blake has a very bad rep in some corners of fandom, no matter whether you _want_ him in your primary relationship or whether you prefer Vila. So, you see, it made sense, that Blake could have been the anti-hero of _Vampire Diaries_. In fact, it made a lot _more_ sense that him being Stefan. 

This was an interesting (though ultimately incorrect) revelation. Damon is the fan favourite. As of January 2017, Damon is in 215 fics to Stefan’s 166 on Archive of Our Own (book fandom) or 3231 to Stefan’s 2414 (TV fandom); Damon has a proper Fanlore page, whereas Stefan’s is incomplete. Much as we might wish it otherwise, Blake is _not_ the fan favourite in his own fandom; Avon is. I thought it was potentially fascinating that, removed from his context and relegated to a secondary character, a form of Blake could have more mass appeal than a form of Avon. By making him explicitly a bad character who can be reformed, rather than a good character who makes morally grey decisions for a non-selfish purpose, he could occupy the same sort of ground that … well, Avon does in _Blake’s 7._  

As I said, I was wrong.

Damon, too, wears a leather jacket. He, too, has dark hair, though it isn’t wavy. He is originally the villain of the piece, but as we introduce other villains (in the form of Katherine and then Klaus) in book 3, Damon is forced to work together with the heroes and we learn that he, too, is sad inside – even the murder he gloated about was actually self-defence. He, too, is obsessed with the girl whom he, too, betrayed. Stefan briefly thinks Damon has done something unforgiveable in letting another girl get murdered by Klaus, but we find out later the murder was not only unavoidable, but also that Damon feels deeply guilty about it anyway. Later, Damon comes back to rescue Stefan, when he could have escaped. He, too, is Avon, though a darker side of Avon than Stefan is.

Two halves of one whole and a divided self – how ironic.

But wait! There is one further male character who has a strong(ish) relationship with Stefan – Matt. Perhaps he’s the one who is Blake! And there are _other_ characters – one of them is a psychic who keeps getting possessed (a bit like Cally). Perhaps, you might think, there is a Blake amongst the rest of the cast.

I’ll use this as a moment to list (some of) the _Blake’s 7_ moments in _Vampire Diaries_ book 4: ‘The Dark Reunion’.

  * “Pleasure is the only reality” – Avon’s line, paraphrased by Damon
  * “And that makes it all worthwhile?” – Avon’s line, paraphrased by Meredith (one of Elena’s best female friends)
  * "I'm not ready to surrender _anything_ ” – Blake’s line (!), given to twice Matt (an All-American teenager who is also in love with Elena)
  * "But for what it's worth, I'm going to try not to either” – almost Blake’s line, given to Stefan
  * “If you're going to kill me, you'd better stop talking and do it. Because maybe you can make me die, but that's all you can make me do” – Avon’s line, paraphrased by Matt
  * This scene from ‘Hostage’ (Stefan plays Blake here and another of Elena’s friends, Bonnie, plays Avon) – "You just want to believe that," Bonnie almost yelled. "Klaus hates all of us! Do you really think he's going to let you walk out of there? Do you think he plans to leave the rest of us alone?" / "No," Stefan said
  * Which leads straight into Stefan playing Avon (in the same scene as the above) – “I've put up with you this long because I had to, but this is the end." He looked at each of them and spoke deliberately, emphasizing each word. "I don't need any of you. I don't want you with me, and I don't want you following me. You'll only spoil my strategy. Anyone who does follow me, I'll kill." (Although in the next chapter we get told Stefan borrowed this line from Damon.)
  * The final confrontation between Stefan and Klaus is the trap-scene from B7’s ‘Duel’, with Stefan attempting to rescue someone who is tied up, only to have a spikey trap drop on him before: “Klaus had come at Stefan with a tall branch of his own—it must have been lying flat on the ground before. It looked just as sharp as Stefan's, making it serviceable lance. But Klaus and Stefan weren't just stabbing at each other; they were using the sticks as quarterstaffs. Robin Hood, Bonnie thought dazedly.”
  * Arguably the moment where Stefan is injured and telling Damon and Bonnie to fight the good fight is reminiscent of Blake, Avon and Cally at Star One, but there is aren’t any B7 lines in the actual scene so I could be imagining it.



There may be other B7 lines or moments – these are the ones that I caught and then remembered. Aside from an _aide memoire_ (what? It could be useful) _,_ there are a few reasons I put this list here.

One is that, along with Stefan, who gets two almost-Blake lines, we have a new contender for the role of Blake double in Matt, who gets the line from ‘Trial’. I’ve thought about it, and while it’s possible Matt could be a _very_ straightforward Blake, he probably isn’t. I don’t think there’s much there.  

The other thing that I thought was worth noting about this list is that there _are_ some Blake lines in the list above, and almost all of the borrowed Avon lines are said to or about Blake. Maybe that’s getting a little tenuous, but what I’m saying is: while Avon is apparently more quotable, Blake is at least _also_ worth quoting, even over other very quotable characters. There aren’t any Vila lines in the whole book, for example (that I saw, anyway). This suggest the author has, at the very least, _an_ interest in Blake and his relationship with Avon. I do ultimately believe the claim that the author used to write B/A fic, even if I have no idea what her pseud was or what fic she wrote.

To go back, then, to the question I asked at the beginning: what I really learned about Blake from the _Vampire Diaries_ is that Blake isn’t the kind of character who could easily play a love interest in a teen romance about vampires. The situation is a bit more complicated than the idea that the author doesn’t simply like Blake (although many shippers don’t, believe it or not) and thus took Avon, but left Blake. Blake needs a plot and an external (i.e. not-personal) motivation, if he’s going to make any sense as a character. He needs something to fight against and for, and even if that plot is relatively small it probably needs to exist outside of the romance arc.

This does feel like I’m saying Blake has to be the protagonist/the point-of-view character/the person most affected by whatever the larger plot is, though that’s not it exactly. I agree that Blake (designed to be the protagonist of a show that continued to bear his name after he stopped being in it) does definitely cause a story to happen around him. Blake makes sense as a protagonist – in fact, if you asked me to choose one individual in _Vampire Diaries_ who _could_ be Blake, I’d have to choose the novel’s heroine, Elena. Elena is fierce and motivated to save her town, and she appears to be dead for most of the fourth book, causing the Avon-vampires to team up with her friends to continue her work. Being the heroine, rather than the love-interest, automatically gives you a big stake in the plot and means the other characters automatically revolve around you to some extent. All that makes you more like Blake.

A Blake clone wouldn’t _have_ to be the protagonist, though. Blake as potential vampire-boyfriend could have been torn between his quest to do Whatever-He-Needed-To-Do and his feelings for the heroine, who either allowed him to make peace with never achieving that quest (the bad kind of B/A story); allowed him to go off and do it without her; or helped him achieve the secondary plot, willingingly because it was her quest too, or unwillingly.

But wait – the plot wouldn’t have had to have been action-adventure/heroism, either! There’s a good B/A Alternate-Universe fic called ‘[Compassion](http://www.squidge.org/~peja/blakes7/Compassion.htm)’ (1995), by Irish, which casts Blake as a doctor researching a cure for AIDS and Avon heading a security firm called Scorpio, which has been assigned to protect Blake. Fellow fic-writer Nova reviewed ‘Compassion’ saying, “A less imaginative writer would probably have cast Avon as the researcher and Blake as the man of action, but Irish's version is way more compelling.” Having made the analysis above, I would now go a step further and argue that not only is this way round more interesting, it would also be difficult to make it work _at all_ the other way around. What would Blake’s driver be in such a scenario? To make money as a good security guard? Protecting the innocent, perhaps, but I see him as a change agent, rather than someone who enforces the status quo.

Other fanfiction, both gen and not-gen, and the Big Finish ‘Liberator Chronicles’, explores the possibilities of Blake as a secondary or even tertiary character. Blake becomes, amongst other things, a useful device for making plot happen – Blake made us go to this planet, etc.

The actual show also explores this, of course, in the third and fourth seasons. With Avon as the protagonist of _Blake’s 7_ , rather than Blake, the narrative drive changes significantly, even as I earlier suggested Avon becomes Blake to some extent. The narrative becomes more personal for everyone, but particularly for Avon, who leads his two seasons towards to two finales that are about _him_ searching for one particular person, rather than, say, trying to get a super computer that could bring down the Federation or blowing up a different super computer to bring down the Federation. This could actually be why so many people prefer Avon to Blake – the personal motivation is more endearing and understandable.

The _Vampire Diaries_ does feature some baddies who are trying to murder our heroes and must be defeated before we can have our happily ever after. It’s a supernatural adventure-type story that culminates in the finale from ‘Duel’, but at its heart it’s about people who are obsessed with each other above everything else. The danger in all cases is deeply personal – first Damon is the villain (because Elena looks like his dead love, Katherine, and Damon hates Stefan), then Katherine is the villain (because she’s crazy now and angry at the brothers) and then Katherine’s sire, Klaus, is the villain (because … hm, I don’t actually know. I guess he just wants to come and mess with the heroes? He’s evil – he does that sort of thing). Travis is trying to kill _Blake_ for personal reasons, but even with personal reasons to hate Travis in return, Blake doesn’t seem to hate him more than as part of the system, so again it doesn’t count. 

It _is_ definitely possible to write a love story for Blake (I’ve written, let’s say … a few), but Blake’s number one concern is the revolution. _Vampire Diaries_ doesn’t have any equivalent, no matter how small. It would be very difficult for Blake to be in it, because he wouldn’t have anything to do. Avon’s story, meanwhile, is about obsessive love, and he looks like a vampire. I think you can see what happened here.

So, Avon is two outwardly distant, yet deeply emotional, vampires; whereas Blake is only truly present in the line “I’m not ready to surrender _anything_ ,” which gets said twice for double the impact. I still don’t like the books, and I don’t think you should necessarily read them if you are a fan of Blake as a character. For what it’s worth, though: after all of this analysis, I have to conclude that L.J. Smith probably does understand both of _Blake’s 7’s_ protagonists after all.


End file.
